The inhabitants of Beckindale, setting for ITV's Emmerdale, are no strangers to calamity, having variously endured shootings, conflagrations and sundry apocalypses bestowed by the great god of ratings. Last week, however, a new and unlooked for catastrophe befell the good folk of Beckindale when the phrase "jam rags" appeared on a blackboard shopping list. Jam rags, for the uninitiated, is a not an especially delicate means of referring to sanitary towels. Can no one protect us from this outrage?

Inelegant as this evidently not-so-offending phrase is, the frisson it generated reflects culture's longstanding weirdness about women's private parts. Where the male member is perceived as somehow clownish, comic, amiable, the vagina remains polite society's great abyss. Accordingly, "dick", "prick" and "knob" are mere playground banter, while "cunt" remains a source of abject hysteria. One is reminded of Pompeii where excavators have unearthed depictions of penises everywhere from oil lamps to doorbells, but female equivalents are missing in action.

If nature abhors a vacuum, then slang still more so. Terms for the female genitalia outstrip all rival inspirations bar drinking and intercourse, leaving the one-eyed trouser snake pitifully castrated. Chaucer flirted with the "belle-chose" and "nether eye". Elizabethan writers, mesmerised by the Virgin Queen's potent and pearl-bedecked lacuna, found countless ways of lauding and – as the reign wore on – satirising the vagina: from a snow bedecked temple of the gods to a hellish, red-hot "gaping gulf".

Shakespeare relished the opportunity to supply the vaginal void – deploying at least a hundred different terms from "fruit dish" and "buggle boe" to "dearest bodily part". Bowdler's Family Shakespeare (1818) so zealously removed the more obvious "country matters" that the text made scant sense and its editor leant his name to the verb "to bowdlerise".

The pre-20th century vagina was many things – delectable, engulfing, tweely pastoral, animal, vegetable, and mineral – however, it is not until the feminist era that slang for menstruation took flight. The early century favoured coy euphemism – "the curse", "time of the month", flower motifs, being "on", having one's guest/friend/relative/decorators in, and the jolly hockey sticks being "off games".

However, Our Bodies Ourselves-type consciousness raising has lead to a more ostentatious, girl-power strain of reference that draws attention more than it disguises. "Flag day", "surfing the crimson tide", and "Liverpool playing at home" create a sort of wisecracking menstrual cognoscenti. There are sexual "closed for maintenance"-style references, and the exuberant "painting the town red".

The Museum of Menstruation provides encyclopaedic detail regarding American period slang: among them tree-hugging invocations of lunar deities, "uterine jihad", vampiric allusions, and the (very) odd George Clooney visitation.

The satirical publication the Onion brings us: "Walking along the beach in soft focus" (a nod to queasy sanitary protection ads), and the resplendent: "It's that time of the month when I am not at my best because my vagina is bleeding". The response of Mail readers to jamragsgate suggests that British culture may finally be ready for such robustness – so long as Venus's honeypot is omitted.